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Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for saving me a click. Yeah, a product whose algorithm has to account for the general theory of relativity is no technical match for hooking up the Shopify API to my web store. Yes, I’m being dismissive, but come…on.

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Which Garmin products require an engineer at Garmin to account for general relativity? Lots of products have GPS, but they use an off the shelf mixed signal IC that contains all the hardware and software required to implement GPS. As an engineer, you just feed augmentation data from a web API and receive a text stream of NMEA messages from the IC. It's literally glue code. The required skill set is the same one required to hook up the Shopify API to a web store (ie. "Software Engineer")

Do you think the average engineer at Garmin is spending their time thinking about the algorithms to interpret GPS signals?

What difference would that make to the question at hand? Do you think the average engineer at Microsoft gives a whole lot of thought to Windows kernel development?

But to answer your question directly: I would have no idea. Do you?

As a former Garmin employee, a surprising number actually do.

I think the point is about if they are a tech company… and they are very literally a software and hardware company. It’s not a question of what the average engineers day to day is.

Would you consider a shop that sells GPS trackers a tech company too?

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